The title of Netherland, the third novel by Irish-born Joseph O’Neill, refers not to “Neverland” or a place at the end of mist and mystery; it embraces rather the Dutch origins of New York City. The events of 9/11 plant dismay in a modern marriage, not eased by a move Read More
Standard Operating Procedure—the film—is a mannered, stealthy web, the product of an artful, rather self-important yet depressed spider who sees Abu Ghraib prison as the obligingly ambivalent provocation for "an Errol Morris picture."
It’s as if, after The Fog of War, that infinitely articulate Read More
There’s a lot of noise already about Charles Bock’s first novel, Beautiful Children. It was there already before I began reading. I was at liberty to go to the book’s Web site, the sheer empty-headed monotony of which at last drove me to start Read More
Read the title carefully; then read it again. Just about everything in this marvelous book has been weighed and assessed more than is usual. William Mann doesn’t settle for the obvious, the given, the rubber stamp. And so, it seems to me, we’re being gently guided before the book begins. For if there was a Read More
Read the title carefully; then read it again. Just about everything in this marvelous book has been weighed and assessed more than is usual. William Mann doesn’t settle for the obvious, the given, the rubber stamp. And so, it seems to me, we’re being gently guided before the book begins. For if there was a Read More
We treasure and enjoy some novelists because they offer us a world, and let us feel we can enter it like original inhabitants. It’s a going home, even if we’ve never been there before. I’ve heard of Americans so intoxicated by the novels of Thomas Hardy that they go to England just to visit what Read More
We treasure and enjoy some novelists because they offer us a world, and let us feel we can enter it like original inhabitants. It’s a going home, even if we’ve never been there before. I’ve heard of Americans so intoxicated by the novels of Thomas Hardy that they go to England just to visit what Read More
She was Mary once, then Freya, Caroline now, and soon she will be Louise. She has every reason to believe that the anonymous security agencies of her nation are busy trying to find her and take her away. That would involve removal, a kind of oblivion—but, oddly enough, that’s been her aim in life already Read More
She was Mary once, then Freya, Caroline now, and soon she will be Louise. She has every reason to believe that the anonymous security agencies of her nation are busy trying to find her and take her away. That would involve removal, a kind of oblivion—but, oddly enough, that’s been her aim in life already Read More
Sometimes you can hear families muttering at each other in their dark and lonely enclosures. The words are like wounds that cannot heal because of huge regret or grievance, but the tone of the talk is so matter-of-fact, so casual, so bored. What are families for? They’re the people we talk and listen to, until Read More
Sometimes you can hear families muttering at each other in their dark and lonely enclosures. The words are like wounds that cannot heal because of huge regret or grievance, but the tone of the talk is so matter-of-fact, so casual, so bored. What are families for? They’re the people we talk and listen to, until Read More
The Ruins of California is a great title, even if it’s hard to know where a name like “Ruin” comes from—and actually, in California, people do still come from somewhere other than a scenarist’s treatment. Take Inez Ruin, a child in 1969 and the narrator of this book. She’s the daughter of divorce: Her mother, Read More
The Ruins of California is a great title, even if it’s hard to know where a name like “Ruin” comes from—and actually, in California, people do still come from somewhere other than a scenarist’s treatment. Take Inez Ruin, a child in 1969 and the narrator of this book. She’s the daughter of divorce: Her mother, Read More
For years, Julian Barnes has been not quite Nabokov or W.G. Sebald. Not quite there yet? Or not quite Julian Barnes? He’s been funny, chilled, sparkish, a dandyish surveyor of fiction and its tropes who often seems like a droll, finger-snapping ringmaster guiding his adroit innovations past literary statuary, picking up prizes, yet never entering Read More
For years, Julian Barnes has been not quite Nabokov or W.G. Sebald. Not quite there yet? Or not quite Julian Barnes? He’s been funny, chilled, sparkish, a dandyish surveyor of fiction and its tropes who often seems like a droll, finger-snapping ringmaster guiding his adroit innovations past literary statuary, picking up prizes, yet never entering Read More
